In the world of online commerce, buyers and sellers use a variety of techniques to ensure goods and services meet their mutual expectations. For example, many users have become familiar with the electronic retail experience through a multitude of different e-commerce agents. Such methods and mechanisms for conducting business through electronic means as generally come to be known as electronic commerce.
In general, electronic-commerce, or simply “e-commerce” comprises the buying and selling of products or services over distributed communications networks such as the Internet. With the widespread emergence of the Internet, an increasing variety of business is conducted using e-commerce methods and techniques. E-commerce has spawned new techniques for the management of electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, online transaction processing, inventory management systems, and the like. Modern e-commerce methods widely take advantage of the communications capabilities of the Internet, although a wider range of computer implemented distributed communications networking can be utilized (e.g., such as e-mail, direct communication, etc.).
Electronic commerce that is conducted primarily between businesses is referred to as Business-to-business or B2B e-commerce. B2B can be open to all interested parties (e.g. commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified participants (private electronic market). Many companies specialize in providing products or services directly to other companies (e.g., their customers). Such companies are typically referred to as direct sellers, which refers to those companies whereby, upon receiving an order, the seller ships products directly to the customer, wholesaler or manufacturer for delivery. For the direct seller, the goal is to remove intermediaries (e.g., disintermediation) and to establish direct customer relationships. Online intermediaries provide another type of electronic retail experience to customers. Online intermediaries are companies that facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers, such as, for example, brokers. Generally, a broker is a company that facilitates transactions between buyers and a variety of different sellers.
With each of these businesses, advantages are afforded to the customer with respect to enabling the online purchasing to be executed faster and with more responsiveness. Product offerings, order requirements, delivery requirements, prices, and the like can be updated immediately to reflect certain sales or deals. The customer can respond to the pressures and requirements of his respective business by immediately and iteratively updating their purchase orders to their preferred supplier.
There exists a problem however, in the handling of an initial order and updates to that initial order. E-commerce is most commonly implemented within the widely distributed communication systems and networks that comprise the Internet, and involves the interaction between multiple widely separated entities, often in very different time zones. E-commerce transactions between such widely separated entities often involves the asynchronous exchange of messages.
For example, in a case where two trading partners are communicating using messages or business documents with each other (e.g., XML based purchase orders, order acknowledgments, invoices, order updates, etc.), there can be cases where a receiving trading partner might receive the messages for a particular business sales transaction out of sequence. For example, an Order Entry System might send order information to a Shipping System to ship a particular order. The order information is typically an XML based document that contains multiple items/lines. At a later point in time, there can be updates to that order or to its items/lines within the Order Entry System. These updates can be such that the Shipping System needs to be notified about the updates before actually shipping that border out to the end customer. Examples include updates increasing the number of items to be shipped in the order, updates changing the shipping destination of the order, and the like.
In the above example, if the Shipping System (e.g., the supplier trading partner receiving messages from the customer trading partner) processes these “Order Update” messages delivered out of sequence, the Shipping System can end up with potentially inconsistent data or can run into a data corruption situation. The mishandled order or mishandled shipping can damage the business relationship between the trading partners, lead to lost opportunities and lost sales, or could ultimately lead to legal issues and recriminations.
Thus, what is required is a solution that can intelligently reconcile an initial order between two partners with any subsequently following order updates. The required solution should intelligently handle distributed communications networks where entities commonly communicate with each other asynchronously. The present invention provides a novel solution to the above requirements.